Conferences are gathering events for people and business sharing a common interest. Trade show conferences seek to bring together retailers, distributors, manufacturers, and consumers in one place to promote the rapid, efficient, and economic exchange of information. Most conferences share similar characteristics: they occupy a large amount of real estate, vendors or exhibitors set up booths to display and advertise their goods and services, and people roam through the real estate visiting booths of interest.
At each booth, the exhibitor will interact with the attendee. The exhibitor and attendee will typically discuss the exhibitor's goods or services, the exhibitor will answer questions from the attendee, and the exhibitor will gauge the attendee's relative interest in the goods, services, or the exhibitor itself. In some situations, the attendee will be a general member of the public, such as an ordinary consumer, while in other situations, the attendee will be another business. In the latter situation, the business-to-business exchange may be formal and may be for the purpose of seeking a supplier, a salesman, a distributor, etc.
Other than the oral information communicated during such an interaction, less transitory information is exchanged as well. The exhibitor often gives the attendee contact information, such as a website address, social media account, or a business card carrying direct personal contact information. The attendee may also provide contact information to the exhibitor.
The interaction ends, and both parties usually judge their interest in the other party. The exhibitor may judge whether the attendee is a likely customer, and may even make a note to call the attendee at a future date. The attendee may judge whether he or she liked the exhibitor, whether he or she plans to call the exhibitor in the future, or whether the exhibitor is someone the attendee wishes to do business with. The exhibitor and attendee, however, are not aware of how the other judges them beyond what was apparent during the interaction.
Before the interaction ends, the exhibitor frequently also provides literature to the attendee. Literature is usually paper literature, such as flyers, brochures, pamphlets, catalogs—whatever the exhibitor thinks is appropriate for the conference, their goods and services, or the particular attendee. Literature provides supposedly helpful information to the attendee in a permanent form. While the exchange of such literature does provide the attendee with something tangible to hold, read, and review, there are a number of problems with this established method of conference communication.
First, the attendee will accumulate a large amount of literature. While the attendee could be attending the conference for the exclusive reason of visiting with one vendor, this is unlikely. Generally, attendees visit many, many exhibitor booths, each of which provides literature to the attendee. As a result, most attendees will carry a bag to hold their accumulated literature. The bag can quickly become heavy, cumbersome, and annoying.
Second, the literature is generally non-specific. While exhibitors have some idea who the attendees will be when they print the literature, they must to some extent make their literature generic to a range of attendees. Therefore, many attendees end up taking more literature than they need, because information relevant to them is bound up with irrelevant information. The exhibitor simply cannot practically filter relevant information from irrelevant information to provide to the attendee.
Third, and related to the first two problems, most of the literature is usually thrown away. Unfortunately, because the attendee ends up carrying around a large amount of mostly irrelevant information, the attendee usually will throw most of it away, rather than schlep it back home or onto an airplane.
Fourth, the literature is extremely expensive. It is quite expensive to print, ship, and set up at a conference. It is so expensive, in fact, that some exhibitors are known to search conference trash cans for discarded literature that they can re-use, rather than re-order or print more literature. The costs for having literature available at a conference can easily reach several thousand dollars for a mid-sized company.
Fifth, there is no possibility for obtaining literature before or after the conference begins. All parties must wait until they are at the conference to obtain literature. An attendee who is interested in a certain exhibitor or product of the exhibitor has no way to obtain conference literature beforehand, which might otherwise allow him to have a more productive conference experience. Similarly, an attendee cannot obtain literature after the conference, unless he writes to the exhibitor and specifically requests material, or requests some type of material that may or may not exist.
Sixth, there is very little objective means for an exhibitor to evaluate the conversion rates or effectiveness of a conference or a particular company representative.
For these reasons and others, a new way to facilitate connections, communications, and the exchange of information is needed.